Jonathan Pollard, Spy for Israel, to Be Released on Parole in November

July 28, 2015 6:18 PM

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WASHINGTON — Jonathan J. Pollard, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for passing classified documents to the Israeli government, will be released on parole in November after 30 years in prison, a government panel decided on Tuesday.

Mr. Pollard’s lawyers announced the decision of the United States Parole Commission on Tuesday afternoon, and officials at the Department of Justice confirmed that Mr. Pollard had been granted parole.

In the months before Mr. Pollard’s latest parole hearing several weeks ago, the Justice Department asked intelligence and law enforcement agencies to determine the effect his release would have. “They didn’t articulate how he was going to commit more crimes,” one senior American official said, referring to the agencies.

WASHINGTON — , who was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for passing classified documents to the Israeli government, will be released on parole in November after 30 years in prison, a government panel decided on Tuesday.

Mr. Pollard, 60, had been scheduled for mandatory parole in November, but could have been kept in prison for years longer if the United States government had objected to his release, citing concerns about an ongoing threat to national security.

Mr. Lauer said it was an “absurdity” to think that Mr. Pollard, who was convicted of passing classified materials to his Israeli handlers, would return to spying. He noted that any information Mr. Pollard retained from his time as a Navy intelligence analyst was more than 30 years out of date. He said the parole commission appeared to have accepted that assurance.

Mr. Pollard, one of the country’s most notorious spies, will walk out of federal prison in Butner, N.C., on Nov. 20. Eliot Lauer, one of the two lawyers who have been working pro bono for the past 15 years to free Mr. Pollard, called his client on Tuesday with the news.

But that hearing set in motion an intense scramble by lawyers for Mr. Pollard to ensure a different result a year later, when he would be eligible for parole after serving 30 years. They wrote letters, cited statistics and introduced evidence that their client met two legal standards for parole: that he had behaved well in prison, and that he posed no threat of returning to a life of espionage.

Last week, officials for the Department of Justice signaled that they to Mr. Pollard’s release if the United States Parole Commission determined that he should leave the prison in North Carolina where he is being held.